storytelling

The modern (e.g. scientific) concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University . Oral history is defined in ABC-CLIO as “a sound recording or transcription of a planned interview with a person whose memories and perceptions of historical events are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. ” The History Matters writers tell us it can refer to “formal and rehearsed accounts” as well as “informal conversations, printed compilations of stories, and recorded interviews. ” Oral history then can come in many formats, but hinges on being a story about an actual event: a “true story” that has added relational and historicizing value

The value of true, unheard stories translates out of academic oral-history institutions into community, art, and activist realms. Cultural worker and long-time storytelling proponent Arlene Goldbard describes their importance: “those who hold power attempt to create or impose a dominant narrative that keeps them on top,” and this hierarchy intends to paint the “society ha[ving] one true culture, and whatever doesn’t belong to it is subculture or folk culture or in some other way second-rate. ” To Goldbard, value is created when individuals tell their personal, true stories [which are often implied to be “missing” otherwise], because they can reinforce, contest, or negate dominant narratives. Goldbard references Paulo Freire’s philosophy when she suggests that participants in cultural projects like storytelling archiving are “subjects in history, and not its passive objects. ”

The generation of this story-history is not only regulated for professionalized, sanctioned individuals. There is a push to create what VKP participant Cecilia O’Leary refers to as citizen historians who “understand their right both to learn and to make history: they assume responsibility for contributing to the ongoing project of uncovering the diversity of our past and expressing that historical knowledge in a public forum. ” Finally, participatory artist and curator Nato Thompson points out the “Growing trend towards “documentary sensibility” in art. ” Lastly, like oral historians, documentary art projects place value on planned interviews with subjects for their addition to cultural and historical records. The annual Visible Evidence conference suggests that preservation of “the material of actuality ” is a critical part of their documentary focus. Canadian documentary filmmaker Sabhia Sumar says “we believe that [documentary] film is the way to transform the world, that it can change people’s mindsets, its like a mirror – you’re able to see your own problems in it, and maybe that will help you rethink things. ” Other peoples’ stories somehow relate to us, if we could just hear them; if we only knew them.

So what if there are a lot of stories? Why might many narratives, presumed to be true, collected in a database so as to be assembled en masse, contain rhetorical or cultural power? Francesca Polletta looks to narrative psychology to trace individual and collective uses of stories—sometimes even contradicting ones—as strategic to develop identities and to “make possible the development of a coherent community.” Current theorists of collective power take on ideas of amassed singularities when describing how political power is generated, as well. Hardt and Negri in Multitude indicate the imperative importance of “active social subjects based on shared commonalities” holding “socioeconomic, racial, gender, and sexuality differences. ” At the same time, they trace the development of a distributed, networked model of connection-as-resistance, which is “creating new hearts and minds ” through the multiplicity of singularities, gathered in the potential rewriting of history. Many little stories then can generate a productive narrative discourse about a topic that isn’t necessarily directly addressed in the lexia. This narrative is something that has new meaning and that did not exist previously to the collection of the story-data.

Effective organization and user interface design of these databases, is then, critical to producing potentially new, powerful stories – new connections can generate real resistance and power. In Empire, these theorists suggest, “Power is exercised through machines that directly organize the brains (in communication systems, information networks, etc.) and bodies (through welfare systems, monitored activities, etc) toward a state of autonomous alienation from the sense of life and desire for creativity. ” Francesca Polletta asks us to remember that “the coherence which stories provide is emotional ” that there is also an embodied component to the experience of a story, embedded in the experience of an embodied subjectivity—in opposition [or defiance?] to institutional machines, “outcomes of movements are visible in the arenas of culture and everyday life, ” thus in these individualizing stories, the collective telling of survival, dignity, and resistance stories emerges as an affective counter-power to institutional oppressions. Rather than “autonomous alienated” second-rate consumers of high culture, people are both producers and produced by folk, family, alternative, and subcultures’ stories. And the more these productions speak, the more little stories become authenticated in the listener.